article thumbnail

Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. Evangelizing Customer Development in Japan.

Japan 292
article thumbnail

The 47th (-46) International Business Model Competition

Steve Blank

The most visible step was the first International Business Model Competition , hosted by the BYU Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. We’ve been teaching that the difference between a startup and an existing company is that existing companies execute business models, while startups search for a business model.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Launching a Portfolio Acceleration Platform at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund

David Teten

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies. The popularity of the model can be judged by the fact that the U.S. Customer Development. A well-developed model is Andreessen Horowitz’s Executive Briefing Center.

article thumbnail

Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development

Steve Blank

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?”

article thumbnail

When Hell Froze Over – in the Harvard Business Review

Steve Blank

For decades this revered business magazine described management techniques that were developed in and were for large corporations – offering more efficient and creative ways to execute existing business models. The Four Steps drew the distinction that “startups are not smaller versions of large companies.”

article thumbnail

The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe more specifically how this model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The greatest risk in startups —and hence the greatest cause of failure—is not the technology risk of developing a product but in the risk of developing customers and markets.

article thumbnail

Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

When Netscape went public, it unleashed a frenzy from the public markets for anything related to the internet and signaled to venture investors that there were massive returns to be made investing in anything internet related. After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. Then one day it was over. IPOs dried up.

Lean 335